CD-ROM Review

Personal Guitar Tutor

Rich Friedman

Learning how to play an instrument takes time and usually involves costly lessons. The eMedia Guitar Method CD-ROM is a remarkably helpful instruction program for beginning guitar students that's an order of magnitude ahead of any book and that does things even a personal tutor can't do. The CD-ROM (available for Windows now, with a Mac version slated to ship in June) gently leads you through a series of 60 comprehensive lessons, ranging from stringing the guitar to playing chords, strumming styles , finger picking, and much more.

The lessons are varied and self-paced and build on previous material. You learn how to replace a string; hold the guitar; learn the different sounds of an acoustic, steel, and electric guitar; and advance at your own pace. There are 30 full-mot ion instructional videos, 3 hours of audio that contains over 100 exercises and songs, and a dictionary that contains fingering charts and sound for more than 250 chords. Using your computer's microphone, you can record your playing and even tune your guitar against a simple-to-use tuning program.

The instruction is not geared toward a specific style of music; it includes songs from such genres as folk, popular, blues, and country. For those who have the patience, discipline, and desire to learn to play a guitar without a personal instructor, eMedia Guitar Method will get you off to a good start.

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Product Information

eMedia Guitar Method.................$59.95

eMedia Corp., 2403 East Aloha St., Seattle, WA 98112
Phone:    (206) 329-5657
Fax:      (206) 329-0235 
Internet: 
http://www.emedia.org/guitar.html


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Computer-Assisted Musical Instruction

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The eMedia Guitar Method CD-ROM includes instructional videos that you can view as you learn a new technique, such as a bass note strum.